Cross-lingual Portability of MLP-Based Tandem Features -- A Case Study for English and Hungarian

Proc. Interspeech 2008

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Toth, Laszlo

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Frankel, Joe

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Gosztolya, Gabor

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King, Simon

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2010-10-05T11:38:56Z

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2010-10-05T11:38:56Z

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2008

en

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http://hdl.handle.net/1842/3838

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One promising approach for building ASR systems for less-resourced languages is cross-lingual adaptation. Tandem ASR is particularly well suited to such adaptation, as it includes two cascaded modelling steps: feature extraction using multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs), followed by modelling using a standard HMM. The language-specific tuning can be performed by adjusting the HMM only, leaving the MLP untouched. Here we examine the portability of feature extractor MLPs between an Indo-European (English) and a Finno-Ugric (Hungarian) language. We present experiments which use both conventional phone-posterior and articulatory feature (AF) detector MLPs, both trained on a much larger quantity of (English) data than the monolingual (Hungarian) system. We find that the cross-lingual configurations achieve similar performance to the monolingual system, and that, interestingly, the AF detectors lead to slightly worse performance, despite the expectation that they should be more language-independent than phone-based MLPs. However, the cross-lingual system outperforms all other configurations when the English phone MLP is adapted on the Hungarian data.

en

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Cross-lingual Portability of MLP-Based Tandem Features -- A Case Study for English and Hungarian